The Dawn of Everything – Ch 5: Many Seasons Ago, Canadian vs. Californian Tribes

Renowned anthropologist and public intellectual David Graeber teams up with professor of comparative archaeology David Wengrow to deliver a trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution — from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state," political violence, and social inequality — and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike — either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could only be achieved by sacrificing those original freedoms, or alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. Graeber and Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today.

Drawing on path-breaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what's really there. If humans did not spend 95% of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? What was really happening during the periods that we usually describe as the emergence of "the state"?

The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.

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Biweekly book discussion group, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) by the anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow. Available in multiple formats and languages. We cover 1 chapter per meeting.

For this meeting, please read Chapter 5 "Many Seasons Ago", book pages 164-209.

You are very welcome to attend if you didn’t do the reading; discussion preference will be given to those who did.

You can find the book here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YXXaVEwZ-cIc37Y0Z9ujEcK3_X2Jpmnh/view?usp=sharing

Or purchase it here: https://www.amazon.ca/Dawn-Everything-New-History-Humanity/dp/0771049846/

The chapter subheads are in quotation marks below.

Chapter 5: “Many Seasons Ago: Why Canadian foragers kept slaves and their Californian neighbors didn’t; or, the problem with ‘modes of production.”

Discussion of all 45 pages of this chapter. The chapter subheads are in quotation marks below.

Part I of today’s meeting (pp. 164-192): “In which we first consider the question of cultural differentiation” — Map and Map inset: North America as defined by early-twentieth-century ethnologists, and The ethno-linguistic ‘shatter zone’ of Northern California — “Where we consider the wildly inadequate, sometimes offensive but occasionally suggestive ways in which the question of ‘culture areas’ has been broached before — In which we apply Mauss’s insight to the Pacific Coast and consider why Walter Goldschmidt’s description of Aboriginal Californians as ‘Protestant foragers,” while in many ways absurd, still has something to tell us — Where we make a case for schismogenesis between ‘Protestant foragers’ and ‘fisher kings’ — Concerning the nature of slavery and ‘modes of production’ more generally.”

Part II of today’s meeting (pages 192-209): “In which we consider ‘the story of the Wogies,’ an Indigenous cautionary tale about the dangers of trying to get rich quick by enslaving others (and indulge ourselves in an aside on ‘Guns, Germs and Steel) — In which we ask: would you rather fish, or gather acorns? — In which we turn to the cultivation of difference in the Pacific ‘shatter zone’ — Some conclusions.”

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